Cracking the Da Vinci Code

Four fabulous freeware tools for pixels, photos and font manipulation.

Do you know what Alexander the Great, Robert De Niro, Albert Einstein, Lewis Carol, Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain, Phil Collins, Amitabh Bachchan, four of the five designers of the Apple Mac, two of the world first astronauts... and Leonardo da Vinci... and me have in common? Doing lots of faltu stuff? Heh heh heh! Well, mebbe... Actually, we're all lefties... Southpaws! Along with Ricky Martin, Picasso, Julius Caesar and Bob Dylan. Check it out later at www.anythingleft-handed.co.uk/famous.html and www.indiana.edu/~primate/left.html. Meanwhile, let's try and crack the Da Vinci code in your DNA with these freebie image and font manipulation and management goodies. Bring out the artist in you, shall we?

The GIMP
The GIMP, a contraction for GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a powerful Open Source image composition, image authoring and photo retouching tool. Call it the garib logon ka Photoshop cos its free, but it can run with the big boys with its paint app, photo-retouching program, image-format converter, online batch-processing system, mass production image renderer… Channels and tabbed palettes, filters and effects, layers and masks, editable text tools and color ops, it’s got ‘em all. A must try, but hey, download both GTK Runtime Environment and GIMP installers and set up GTK before installing the GIMP.
OS: Windows XP, 2000, NT
Size: 7.7 MB
http://gimp.org

Google Picasa
Great photo management tool that finds, organises, edits, prints, and shares images on your PC and linked digicam as chronologically sorted thumbnail preview albums. It works with JPEG, GIF, BMP, PSD, and movie files. Even if you dunk its surprisingly easy-to-use editing prowess (cropping, red-eye removal, enhancements and effects), Picasa’s photo tagging and finding abilities alone make it worthwhile. With a simple and powerful interface, it’s a gotta-have tool for pro, amateur, wannabe and even the occasional photo buff. Ah, it’s a RAM hog btw…
OS: Windows XP, 98, Me, 2000
Size: 3.17 MB
http://picasa.google.com

The Font Thing
Kya naam hai, but quite laa jawab hai boss! TFT is a font management thingie that helps you find and preview the TrueType fonts on your system—installed or skulking. An old proggie it is. But you can install, uninstall, delete, copy, move fonts, and view sample text or individual characters in whatever point size on the fly, tag your own notes, filter fonts according to serif, sans serif etc, as well as get detailed information on each font. You can also pick your font colors, set up drop-down lists of standard text samples, rename font files to avoid conflicts, and load fonts temporarily for use without installing them. And the no-frills, clean interface is a real blessing. It can handle over 16,000 fonts but your system runs like a sloppy, endless saas-bahu soap.
OS: Windows XP, 98, Me, 95, 2000, NT
Size: 1.1MB
http://members.ozemail.com.au/~scef/tft.html

XnView
It can read more than 400 graphic file formats--including GIF, BMP, JPEG, PNG, TARGA, multipage TIFF, camera RAW, JPEG 2000, MPEG, AVI, Quicktime, EXIF and IPTC metadata. And export to about 50. Because it’s one heck of a nifty multi-format graphics browser, viewer, and converter. You can edit, crop, and add filters to your photos. It supports red eye rectification, generates HTML pages and contact sheets, executes batch conversion and batch renaming, offers WIA and TWAIN support, and does image comparisons. The viewer is Explorer-like, you can set up slide shows with transitions effects, and also make screen captures. Solid rae!
OS: Windows XP, 98, Me, 95, 2003 Server, 2000, NT
Size: 3.47 MB
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enxnview.html